Why Agents Need Advance Notice to Set Showing Appointments

Real estate agents know that it can be fun and exciting viewing potential homes that you might be interested in purchasing. When you find a home online, in an automated e-mail, or driving down the street, you might want to see it right now. However, even if it is a vacant home, we still need to make an appointment with the listing office.

If you want to view several Scottsdale homes for sale, we need time to set up a logical route, put a viewing time on each one and then call each individual listing office. We need to be in our offices to print up the listing sheets before we can even work on setting up the appointments. Although we can use our smart phone, tablet or laptop on the road if necessary, it isn't that easy if there are multiple properties to set up. If you reach us when we're out of our office, we most likely will need to get back in order to set up appointments, especially if there are more than one.

Sometimes we have to contact individual agents who set their own appointments, and we usually get their voice mail. I don't understand why a busy agent would set their own appointments, but some do, and we are at their mercy of when they're going to listen to our voicemail and then they have to call the owners if the home is occupied. I've had agents not call me back at all and I had to chase them down. That's another story I've written blog posts about before. I doubt their sellers know that they're missing out on showings because of the way their agents set appointments on their own.

I use an automated showing system that is built into the MLS.  It is set up so that our sellers get texted and e-mailed directly by the showing agent, and they just hit Y or N to the showing request. This also works for vacant listings, and the agents get an immediate showing approval. Our sellers will only miss out on showings if they're not available when the request comes in or if they can't accommodate the showing.

Busy agents might already be working with their buyer or seller clients when you're interested in seeing a home in Scottsdale. That's why we also need advance notice, so we can set aside enough time to show you properties without rushing you through. We want you to take your time viewing properties and that's how we treat all of our buyer clients.

Most showings don't allow overlapping appointments. Sometimes, sellers simply can't allow a showing for many different reasons. I've had sellers having parties, out-of-town guests, someone in the house was sick, a dog was in the house and no one could get there to get it out of the home for the showing, etc. 

I hope this sheds some light on the fact that we can't just drop everything and show a house immediately. We have to follow our showing rules and in many cases, we have to wait for a response from the listing agent or home seller (or both) and we need the details on how to access the property. It could be a lockbox or someone will be in the home to let us in. We can't just show up.

If you want to see a home in Scottsdale please give Judy Orr a call or text at 480-877-1549 and we'll do our best to get you in as quickly as possible. We show homes in Scottsdale, Carefree, Cave Creek, Fountain Hills, North Phoenix, Paradise Valley, and other Valley areas.